New MSN search engine: How good is it?
by Nowshade Kabir
Published on this site: November 24th, 2004 - See
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If you have an online business or you just use Internet as
one of your marketing tools, you know that how important are
the search engines in your quest to get more targeted visitors
to your website. The changes in search engine field can have
unexpected outcome for your online endeavors. That's why it
is important to be well-informed on impending progress in
this sphere.
Microsoft has recently come out with the latest beta version of
its much touted search engine. Supported by 5 billion indexed pages,
it is poised to become one of the most powerful earch engines in
the market. Right now MSN is using Yahoo provided search results
for queries done through its search page, which it's planning to
change somewhere in early next year with its own. You can check
out the search engine at http://beta.search.msn.com.
Google's immense success and profitable business model enticed
Microsoft and others to look into lucrative search engine
market seriously. Amazon, for example, has recently launched
its web search site A9.com. Today, Google carries out almost
50 percent of all searches on the Internet. Yahoo with 24
percent of the market share is trailing in a distant second
place. MSN with 14 percent lags far behind from the competitors
a situation, which won't be very easy to change.
However, Microsoft has a long history of copying booming products;
make their replicas some times, arguably, better then the originals,
and clinch larger portion of the market shares. Microsoft has successfully
done this to Borland's dominance of programming languages in the
early days. The list of victims continued with once utterly popular
word processor WordPerfect, market dominant spreadsheet
Lotus 1-2-3, Novell's Netware and finally Netscape. Since 90 percents
of all personal computers run on Windows, Microsoft gets an extra
edge against its competitors, which it's capable of exploiting very
effectively.
What is new in MSN search?
This version of MSN search incorporated several interesting features,
which other search engines are lacking at this moment.
Direct answers to plain language factual searches
Unlike Google or Yahoo, Askjeeves has better ability to find
answers to direct plain language searches. MSN search has
taken this one step further by adding Microsoft's Encarta
reference tools to its features. Ask, what is the capital
of Russia? You will get the right answer at the beginning
of the result page. Questions like "What is the size
of a Blue whale?" also brings in exact answer. No doubt,
students will love this feature as it makes a lot easier for
them to get specific answers to the questions related to facts
and figures.
Near me
Microsoft's new search engine includes a ''near me'' button that
helps users find websites for a given location. In this release,
this works only in United States.
Once you press this button MSN search figures out where are you
located using your computer's IP address. However, this can be easily
superseded by changing setting preferences. This is important if
you are located in New York and looking for something near Boston.
Search Builder
In other search engines, if you would like to customize your search
you have to use advance search options from a separate page. MSN
search has made it a lot easier for average users by adding the
ability of customization right on the search box.
Once you click on the Search Builder from the link right underneath
of the search box a drop down menu will open. Initially, the menu
might look a little confusing; with little patience you will be
able to use available great features easily.
The tool "search terms" allows you to add Boolean search
options. Site/ Domain tool is used for limiting a search to specific
site or domain, or excluding them from your query. "Links to"
tool helps you make your query within the sites linked to a specific
site. Country/ region and language options are required to make
geography or language specific searches.
The best option from this group of features is the "Result
Ranking". This option allows you to refine searches and give
you a better control over the search result by using a set of three
bars. By sliding the bars up and down you choose whether you want
to see more of exact match or approximate match, more popular or
less popular, static or dynamic pages as search results. You can
generate an impressive range of results for a single query thanks
to this option.
This could be very useful for some types of searches. For example:
if you are looking for news based pages, you might prefer to choose
more dynamic pages rather than static ones.
Preference setting
Most notable options on the setting page are "Safe Search"
ability to filter out sexually explicit images and texts,
and ability to fix the number of results displayed from one particular
site.
Relevancy
Many reviewers claim that if you compare the search results with
Google, MSN search engine "falls short" in relevancy.
However, my results showed otherwise.
I ran a search on the phrase "trade leads". The
results from both the search engines were very relevant. The
only difference in MSN I noticed is our http://trade-leads.rusbiz.com
managed to turn up on the first page. But, a search on the
word "e-catalog" was brought better more
relevant results on MSN then Google. This time too
I was happy to see http://e-catalog.rusbiz.com on the first
page of MSN search results.
Conclusion
If you consider all the new features of MSN that Google does not
have yet, its ability to cover natural language queries, quality
level and relevance of results, ability to refine searches, there
is no doubt that MSN search engine is as good as Google.
Nowshade Kabir is the founder, primary developer and present
CEO of Rusbiz.com. A Ph. D. in Information Technology, he has wide
experience in Business Consulting, International Trade and Web Marketing.
Rusbiz is a Global B2B Emarketplace with solutions to start and
run online business. You can contact him at mailto:nowshade <at>
rusbiz.com
http://ezine.rusbiz.com/archivenews.html?nl_oid=40.
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